State and U.S. officials on Tuesday heralded completion of a draft plan for renewable energy development in the deserts of Southern California, one they hope will ease conflicts that have grown in number and intensity since work began on the plan five years ago.

As an answer to climate change, conservationists have overwhelmingly supported President Barack Obama’s and the state’s push for desert-sited renewable energy – especially massive solar power plants. But projects have drawn increasing scrutiny from mainline organizations, like the Sierra Club, and outright opposition from smaller groups.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan focuses on 22,585,000 acres of the Mojave and Colorado/Sonoran deserts in Kern, Inyo, San Bernardino, Riverside, Los Angeles, Imperial and San Diego counties, and will attempt to guide projects to “Development Focus Areas” – disturbed lands and other areas deemed less environmentally sensitive – by promising speedier and less expensive permitting.

The plan’s several alternatives try to make way for up to 20,000 megawatts of new renewable energy capacity – wind and geothermal, in addition to solar – and the draft preferred alternative designates just over 2 million acres as focus areas.

“We’re going to go where we have to go to get the energy and we’re not going to go where we can’t go to protect this God-given environment,” U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) said at a news conference held at a wind farm in the Coachella Valley.

The DRECP builds on the administration’s designation of “solar zones” on public land in several Western states, including California, extending to private land and – conservationists hope – minimizing gray areas that in effect remained open for development. In a teleconference organized by the Sierra Club on Monday, Kim Delfino, California director for Defenders of Wildlife, called the DRECP a “much broader and more holistic view” of renewable energy development in the desert.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, after extolling the beauty and fragility of the desert, said at Tuesday’s announcement that completion of the draft was “a major milestone” for responsible development of renewable energy and added that she hoped it would be “one of many we can get across the finish line in the two and a half years I have left in this job.”

The enormous draft DRECP will be open to public comment beginning September 26 through next January 9, and conservation groups and developers can be expected to give it thorough vetting.

“We are still analyzing the plan, and there will no doubt continue to be debate about where to site clean energy projects, and how to best conserve areas important for wildlife, wilderness, and recreation,” the Sierra’s Club’s Barbara Boyle said in a statement released Tuesday. “But we are hopeful that the DRECP will become a model for sustainable, well-sited development as our state continues its transition to clean energy.”

Glenn Stewart, a zoology professor and board member of the Desert Tortoise Council, said before release of the plan that it “must enhance, not detract” from current protections for the endangered desert tortoise and other vulnerable species and their habitats.

“If it promotes development of renewable energy at the expense of other important priorities, than the DRECP has failed,” Stewart said.

Stewart and other conservationists say they want to avoid more developments like the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a 372-megawatt solar thermal plant built on 3,500 untrammeled acres just north of Interstate 15 and a few miles from the Nevada state line.

Mitigation and protective measures were required of the plant’s developers, but most conservationists still count the siting as a mistake. In addition to its entanglements with the desert tortoise, the Ivanpah plant’s “solar flux” created by giant mirrors directing sunlight onto 450-foot-tall towers has been accused of igniting and killing birds in large numbers. The plant’s owners say that risk is exaggerated.

Other species considered at risk in the desert include the desert bighorn sheep, Mohave ground squirrel, Parish’s daisy and golden eagle. In all, the DRECP names 37 species of amphibians and reptiles, birds, fish, mammals and plants as “Covered Species” afforded special protection.

Some conservationists argue reliance on distributed renewable energy resources is the best path to reduced carbon emissions, and would avoid putting fragile ecosystems and their inhabitants at risk. But EDF Renewables Energy’s Vice President Mark Tholke said “we’re going to need to do a lot more than rooftop solar – we’re going to need large-scale projects.” Tholke, in the Sierra Club teleconference on Monday, wasn’t prepared to endorse the plan without carefully studying it, but he added that siting projects was “getting more difficult and it’s time to have a plan.”

One industry group that wasted no time in reacting to the plan – and denouncing it – was the wind industry group CalWEA, which counts EDF Renewable Energy as a member (the company also does solar in California).

“It now appears that our worst fears are being realized: all five DRECP Plan Alternatives could end most wind energy development in California,” Nancy Rader, executive director of CalWEA, said in an emailed statement. The group went on to say that even the alternative most favorable to wind energy “would preserve for exploration a very small fraction of the best wind resources in the desert region – the region containing most of the state’s remaining commercially viable wind resources.”